SCIENCE AND COTTON 293 



unfavourable to the development of intimate scientific investi- 

 gations on cotton, as distinct from the immediate utilitarianism 

 of economic work. While reserving some further remarks on 

 general method until later in this article, those scientists who 

 have been concerned with cotton investigations of late years, 

 and the botanists in particular, may well ask themselves a few 

 questions as to the drift of their work, especially as to whether 

 our suggestions pay, or in other words, are our results suffi- 

 ciently comprehensive to be simply and cheaply applied ? 



Much has been written and spoken about the improvement 

 of cotton, but "improvement" is a very wide term. It will 

 possibly be of some service to put forward a single definite 

 object, which the most advanced investigations at all parts of 

 the trade are settling upon as a prime necessity, for a hundred 

 different reasons. This object is simply Uniformity. 



An unopened bale of cotton has potentialities which are 

 almost infinitely variable, according to the source from which 

 it is derived. The length of its fibres may range from 15 to 

 50 mm., their breaking-strain from 1 to 10 grams, the diameter, 

 the colour, the pitch of the twist, the lustre, flexibility, elasticity, 

 and a number of other minor properties (which at present seem 

 to be incapable of definition) all cover a wide range. Even 

 within the best bale of any one kind there are great differences 

 from hair to hair. Although many of these differences are not 

 obvious to the untrained eye or hand, though some of them can 

 only be differentiated by persons born with a natural aptitude 

 for the task — and some are only capable of final resolution by 

 the actual spinning-behaviour of the cotton — yet they are all 

 real. An expert in Alexandria can often assign a lump of cotton 

 to the village of Egypt in which it was grown. 



Many of these characters by which the value of a sample are 

 estimated are, nevertheless, merely indices, and not essentials. 

 A remarkable example of this came under the writer's notice in 

 connection with his work in Egypt on the isolation and propa- 

 gation of pure strains of cotton. Some samples from the first 

 year of propagation in bulk, grown under conditions which 

 were not strictly those of field cultivation, but markedly inferior, 

 were reported upon by the highest local authorities on com- 

 mercial cotton. Their report was based on the handling of the 

 lint, and stated that in the case of two out of three sets of 

 ordinary cottons examined, the lint was perhaps rather inferior 

 20 



